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Hawaii’s hourly minimum wage would increase over two years to $15 by 2020 under a proposal advanced Tuesday by the Senate Labor Committee.
Senate Bill 2291 would raise the state’s minimum wage from $10.10 an hour to $12.25 per hour in 2019, and to $15 per hour the following year — a 48 percent increase overall. The rate increased to its current level on Jan. 1, the final of four annual increases that began in 2015.
Hawaii is one of 13 states with a minimum wage of $10 an hour or higher. An estimated 4.6 percent of hourly workers in the state, or about 30,000 employees, are paid the minimum wage, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The proposal was widely supported by labor organizations and individuals who said Hawaii’s high cost of living quickly eats up wages here, but was strongly opposed by employers who contend costs are too high.
The Hawaii Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice testified that at $10.10 per hour a person working full time with no days off earns $21,000 a year in gross income. “With the highest cost of living in the nation, mainly caused by sharp increases in the cost of housing, $10.10 is not a living wage for a single adult in Hawaii, much less adults supporting children and others,” the center said.
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On Monday, New Year’s Day, some workers in Colorado will get a pay raise. The minimum wage will increase 90 cents, from $9.30 to $10.20 an hour. This is because Colorado voters passed a law that gradually increases the minimum wage; by the final year of the plan, in 2020, it will grow to $12 an hour.
As was the case prior to the passage of Amendment 70 in November 2016, both proponents and those in opposition to it have made arguments about its impact after the first year. Sonia Riggs, president of the Colorado Restaurant Association, is against the increased wage. She tells Colorado Matters it will cause restaurants to close and create a greater pay disparity between servers and workers in the back of the operation, like dishwashers.
Michelle Webster, manager of research and policy analysis with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, is for the wage increase. It’s an important means of elevating the economic impact of the state’s lowest-paid workers, Webster tells Colorado Matters.
More than 104,000 teens (16- to 19-year-olds) work and actively contribute to the Massachusetts economy. As working teens, they learn job skills and gain experience and responsibility. Many working teens also play important roles in helping meet financial needs for not only their families but also for themselves, like paying for college. Most teen workers (about 82 percent) earn near or at the minimum wage, which as of January 2017 was $11 an hour – finalizing a three-year phase-in of an $11 an hour minimum wage in Massachusetts. Currently, teens make up 12 percent of minimum wage earners. This brief looks at who teen workers are, their contributions to family income, how a subminimum wage could affect teen workers, and whether there have been adverse effects on teen employment from minimum wage increases.
Colorado has one of the strongest performing economies in the country. Job growth has been robust for the past several years, consistently ranking Colorado among the top states for job creation. The unemployment rate has dropped steadily since 2010 to 3.3 percent in 2016. Real median household income continues to grow and is now slightly above the pre-recession level. And poverty rates have fallen since 2012, dropping to 11 percent in 2016.
Yet, this report points to several challenges to achieving an economic recovery in Colorado that is broadly shared and enduring:
- The median hourly wage has been falling or flat since the recovery began.
- Economic gains are increasingly concentrated among a small share of high earners in the state.
- While jobs have returned to the state, not all workers have returned to work.
- Colorado is increasingly becoming a multiracial state with a persistent race-based economic divide.